The Convoy

Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the Rwandan massacres of 1994, in which 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered.
 
***Finalist for the Prix Du Livre Inter 2024***
 
‘A non-fiction book which must be recognised as a major work of literature, for here, along with the extreme violence and the story of survival in a time of horrors, is a hitherto unrecorded truth’ Nathalie Crom,Télérama    
 
‘A gripping story, at once a personal account and a reflection on the indelible traces of genocide’ Sophie Rosemont, Vogue France
 
‘Bare-bones, deeply moving and crucial’ Olivier Mony, Livres Hebdo
 
‘A powerful indictment of cowardice in the face of cruelty’
Nelly Kaprièlian-Self, Times Literary Supplement
 
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On the 18th of June 1994, weeks before the end of the massacres in which hundreds of thousands of her fellow Tutsi, Rwanda’s Bantu-speaking ethnic group, were slaughtered by the Hutu, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were fortunate to find a safe passage out of Rwanda with a convoy of children organised by a Swiss humanitarian organisation.
 
Fifteen years later, after rebuilding her life and becoming a successful novelist, Mairesse is ready to begin the long process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape. Beginning with the BBC team, which told the story of the convoy, then by talking to aid workers, journalists, fellow escapees and consulting many archives, she pieces together personal accounts and records to make coherent the forces at work in Rwanda at the time of the genocide.
 
The Convoy questions and criticises the Western media through which African survivors are very often denied their own voices. Thirty years on from the Rwandan genocide, such devastating accounts are now, by a bitter twist of fate, more crucial than ever.
 
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